Isabelle Licari-Guillaume is a former student of the Ecole normale supérieure de Lyon and holds the Agrégation in English. She has recently finished her doctoral studies at the Université Bordeaux Montaigne, under the supervision of Prof. Jean-Paul Gabilliet. Drawing from cultural history as well as media aesthetics, her work focuses on DC Comics’ Vertigo imprint, and more specifically on the role played by British scriptwriters such as Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison. Isabelle Licari-Guillaume has written a number of articles on connected topics and edited Les Langages du corps dans la bande dessinée (2015). She also translated Craig Thompson's latest graphic novel, Space Dumplins.
One of the first original creations for DC’s Vertigo line, Milligan and Fegredo’s Enigma begins as a deconstruction of superhero tropes; however, it then veers into a narrative of sexual discovery when the protagonist Michael Smith and his favourite comic book hero, the Enigma, unexpectedly fall in love. In many ways, Enigma can be read as an eccentric text that uses intentionally flawed narrative structures, destabilizes generic tropes and ultimately denounces rigid gender constructs. Milligan and Fegredo’s attempt to defend heterodoxy within the constraints of mainstream comics publishing is, I argue, one of the texts that would go on to define Vertigo’s specific position as a halfway-house between mainstream and alternative.
